Ethical Decision Making of Nurses Working in Emergency Department of Regional Hospitals, Southern Thailand
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Abstract
Objectives: To study the ethical decision-making of nurses in the situation at emergency department. Methods: This study is descriptive research. The sample was selected based on a purposive sampling. The inclusion criteria were set for recruitment of the sample composed of 136 nurses working in an emergency department for no less than one years. Data collection employed by Demographic data and Ethical decisionmaking of nurses in four situations. The ethical decision-making questionnaire was examined for content validity by three experts (CVI = .90) and the reliability percent of agreement was .87. The data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics. Results: The findings showed that 56.60% reported physicians to provide information about patients’ needs when patient refused treatment, 58.10% explained in a way patients could understand and confirming that patients had received their medication in the outpatient department when non-urgent patients want to receive emergency services, 76.50% involved coordinating with the health insurance department when patient needs urgent surgery, but there is no health insurance, 32.40% explained to the patients’ caregiver/relative that patients had died when do not resuscitate (DNR). Conclusion: The ethical decision making of samples were used the principle and concept of ethics; patient rights beneficence and truth telling.
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